Pages

Monday, September 13, 2010

You Can See Right Through Nikki Haley's Lies

Nikki Haley is your typical Republican.A 'Say one thing, and do another' Republican.Nikki Haley has based her campaign on the fact that she is nothing like current Republican governor, Mark "Appalachian Trail" Sanford, and that, if elected, her administration would be completely transparent. No secrets withheld from the people of South Carolina.Nikki Haley lies.It seems that she was asked, as was Democratic gubernatorial candidate Vincent Sheheen, to release legislative emails to the media. Sheheen has complied; Haley has not. Oh, she has released some emails, but others, well, not so much. And now her campaign says no further information will be coming from them; there are no more emails.Nikki Haley is a hypocrite.Vincent Sheheen has been hammering at Haley over her lack of transparency ever since she invoked a legislative exemption three months ago to shield her taxpayer-funded correspondence from the public. That's right, the Queen of Transparent government, is actually rather opaque.According to The State newspaper, Haley referred to this exemption again last week in an effort to justify the limited amount of information she finally released.So, just how incomplete was Haley’s disclosure?First off, the hypocrite has only released emails from her “G” drive, which is where constituent email, and political spam, is sent. She has refused to release information from her “L” drive, which is where lawmakers conduct the majority of their electronic correspondence. In addition, the emails Haley released last week only cover a three month period--April to June--of this year, making them totally irrelevant to reporters seeking to investigate any of the three separate affair allegations that have been made against her. And, more importantly, Nikki Haley did not release any information from her state-issued computer hard drives; those drives keep a permanent record of all sent and received messages, as well as any deleted emails.So, what Nikki Haley did was to basically dump all her political spam emails, and correspondence from her constituency, in the laps of reporters, and call it a day. And she calls that being transparent. But, the release of Haley’s emails was tightly-controlled by her campaign: reporters were not provided with copies of the emails, nor were they allowed to take photographs of them. That is Nikki Haley's definition of transparency in government.

By contrast, Vincent Sheheen has released all emails from both his “L” and “G” drives. So, not surprisingly, the Sheheen campaign has blasted Nikki Haley for her failure to come clean, going so far as to compare her actions to those of another, less than transparent Republican, Richard Nixon.Tray Robertson, Sheheen campaign manager:“We have heard this story before...remember the missing 18 minutes of the tape? [Well] Representative Haley did not release all of her emails today. She did not release her L drive emails. The Freedom of Information deadline was August 2nd, but she delayed weeks and many of the emails have been deleted. What did those emails say and why weren’t they released? If Representative Haley really believed in transparency, she would have never have dropped these right before the weekend, which is a classic trick by politicians to hide bad news. What does Representative Haley have to hide?”What she has to hide, and what she clearly cannot hide, is the fact that she is more of the same from the Party Of No. She is not honest; she says one thing and does another; she does not play by the rules which she, herself, have set up.It's clearly transparent that Nikki Haley is wrong for South Carolina.